Commercial enterprises implement policies that embody decisions about how corporate assets should be managed. For example, a policy implemented by a video provider says that a particular video will be available for online rental only for the next two months. The purpose of such a policy (rather than a much simpler policy that says, for example, that all videos are available for rental at all times) is to maximize rental income while decreasing the resources that would be needed if all videos were made available at all times. (It is expected that some consumers will respond to the limited rental window by renting the video when it is available rather than waiting and running the risk that the video would not be available at a later time.)
The simplicity of the above example obscures the fact a corporation may have very many assets and that a specific policy may need to be implemented for each one. To extend the above example, while a single rental-window policy could be implemented for all videos, in reality the videos and their expected markets are all different, which means that, perhaps, each one should have a rental-window policy specific to it.
These asset-specific policies are often written by human experts who review the corporate assets and their commercial context and then craft an asset-specific policy to implement the corporation's goals. Having a policy specific to each asset can lead to increased efficiency and profits as each asset is treated in the manner most appropriate to it.
However, this specificity places a great burden on the human experts and increases the possibility of human error. To address these issues, some policies are drafted to depend upon variables that attempt to account for differences among assets and for their changing contexts, but keeping these context-aware policies up-to-date conflicts with the goal of making them as flexible as possible.